Highland planning blog

Today we had the opportunity to facilitate a special event with the Webster Chamber of Commerce on behalf of one of our newest clients, the Webster Community Coalition for Economic Development (WCCED). Due to a stand out submission by the Coalition's Executive Director, Matt Chatfield, Webster was recently recognized by Frontier Communications as one of America’s 50 Best Communities (ABC) through the America’s Best Communities Prize Competition. The ABC Prize Competition is a multi-year process during which Webster (Town and Village) was selected in the top 50 from over 400 communities in 27 states.

The recognition includes an award of $35,000 from Frontier Communications to WCCED for use in the development of a Community Revitalization Plan. WCCED is facilitating the development of Webster’s plan to compete against the remaining 49 communities for position as one of eight finalists taking home $100,000 to help kick-start plan implementation. Frontier Communications will then award grand prizes of up to $3 million to the communities that create and implement the most successful revitalization strategies.

Once they had the background on ABC, we jumped right into our exercise.

Matt and I designed a one-hour agenda around a facilitation method called World Cafe. World Cafe is a structured conversational process intended to facilitate open and intimate discussion, and link ideas within a larger group to access the collective intelligence in the room. Participants move between a series of tables where they continue the discussion in response to a set of questions.

Our questions were:

What is Webster’s competitive advantage in relation to its peers?

What do you think government should be doing to improve Webster’s competitive advantage?

What do you think small business should be doing to improve Webster’s competitive advantage?

How should Webster best invest the $3 million prize from America’s Best Communities to support our small businesses?

We warmed up with the first question as a large group, and spent about ten minutes brainstorming a list of things that provide a competitive advantage for Webster, such as access to parks and the lake, a strong transportation network, and quality schools.

Then we split the room into three groups and they spent 12 minutes per table answering the final three questions. We came up with an enormous list of ideas, reported back to the larger room, and then asked everyone to place a star or dot next to the item that was their biggest priority.

Did I mention that the entire Highland Planning staff attended this meeting? All three of us. That was actually unprecedented. We had never facilitated a meeting together. Here is a photo of Jen providing an overview of the ideas generated around question #4.

In just one hour, we generated a lot of great ideas and created a lot of support for this contest. The business owners were enthusiastic about the discussion, Webster's competitive advantages, and how they would spend $3 million.

The next step is to type up all the input for Matt to incorporate in his planning process.... and plan the next meeting! This process has been so fun and we are feeling very positive about the engagement process and Webster's chances of making it to the next round of the competition.

Do you know about Wall\Therapy? It's a Rochester-based public community-level intervention that "uses mural art as a vehicle to address our collective need for inspiration." The project began by Dr. Ian Wilson in 2012. Every year, artists from around the world come to the City of Rochester on the same week to install murals. In it's fourth year, the program has contributed a great deal art and inspiration to our city, and it has also sparked a public dialogue about art and community.

In April, Lisa Kribs-Lapierre from This Good World proposed the idea of a mural for our new home at 820 South Clinton Avenue. We called our friend Erich from Wall\Therapy, he came to check out the building, and and it all came together quickly. He proposed work by an amazing artist named Handiedanwho is based in Amsterdam. She looked at photos of the building, sent us a concept, we loved it, and before we knew it, she was here in Rochester getting to work.

The end result is better than we could have imagined. It's a wheat paste mural called "Bollywood Sugar." It's a powerful piece that helps to achieve the vision we have for our revitalized building as a new landmark for the city.

Many many many thanks to Handiedan, Wall\Therapy, Urban Nation Berlin, and all the people who came by to offer their support and encouragement over the last few weeks. We know we will enjoy this piece for many years to come.

On Thursday, June 25th, Sue Hopkins, a planner at Bergmann Associates, and I facilitated a futurology brainstorm at the Region 1 American Planning Assocation Conference in Saratoga Springs, NY. The session topic was how will autonomous vehicles change the way we plan.

Sue has an interest in autonomous vehicles, and has been reading up on the topic for a few years. She realized that there is a lot of discussion about insurance and safety, but there has yet to be a focus on the impact these vehicles will have on communities. With this in mind, we set out to facilitate a brainstorm with our planning colleagues to develop ideas on the topic. We intend to develop a white paper on the topic and our discussion in the coming weeks.

At the start of the 90 minute session, the 15 participants introduced themselves. Sue provided a short overview of the state of research on autonomous vehicles. She showed some of the following images to get people thinking:

She also shared some background information on the different levels of automation, and the estimated timeframes that we will see cars developed at each level:

After the presentation, I led participants through a method called focused discussion (also known as ORID), with four questions that intended to draw out four types of reflections: objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional. The questions were:

What is memorable about what Sue just told you?

How did it make you feel personally?

How are autonomous cars relevant to the planning profession?

What are future implications and considerations that we, as planners may want to consider? What additional questions does the planning profession need to ask? What will be the biggest opportunities over the next 30 years for the planning profession?

(It's true. That was more than four questions. You are so attentive.)

To solicit responses to the first two questions, we used a mobile polling technology called Poll Everywhere. Participants joined the poll by texting a message to a specific number associated with the poll. Once they had joined, they were able to respond to questions using their phones.

While it was only a group of 15 people, and everyone was excited to get talking, Sue and I wanted to use this application to break the ice and engage everyone right off the bat. Here are a few of the responses we received with those first two questions:

Everyone enjoyed reading other people's responses. As I read each out loud, participants remarked and added additional information that resulted in everyone talking to one another. It worked well.

When we got to the third question, we switched to paper and markers. We brainstormed the areas of the planning field that will be influenced by autonomous cars and we came up with more than 10. Then we chose a few key topics and broke into small groups to discuss the implications related to land use, equity, the environment. A fourth group decided to focus on the short-term benefits.

All in all, it was a fascinating discussion. The 90 minutes went quickly, and several participants stayed in the room well into the session break to keep talking. I hadn't really thought about this topic at all, but now I keep daydreaming about the day my car will valet itself in February when I'm going to dinner at my favorite restaurant. I have also been thinking about the implications of these cars for equity and land use. And how they will likely pop up in large metropolitan areas before they arrive in places like Western New York.

Sue and I have started to review our notes and think about the white paper. We plan to share a draft with the 15 participants of the session and get their feedback. We also hope to post it in The Upstate Planner. When we finish it, I'll also be sure to post it here on the blog.

Truth be told, my favorite part of the session was testing out Poll Everywhere with the group and using ORID as a guide to the facilitation. Those are two methods that I learned about from the IAP2 training I attended in February. I think that proves I am practicing in the right area (i.e. doing what I love). Lucky me.